


Hear The Falling Snow

by akire_yta



Series: prompt ficlets [524]
Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 21:47:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13280508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akire_yta/pseuds/akire_yta
Summary: for the TAG Secret Santa 2017: photowizard17 requested among other things "Virgil and snow "





	Hear The Falling Snow

People forgot sometimes it still snowed in Kansas.

A lot of the world’s weather had changed, after the Global Conflict, after centuries of environmental neglect and greed.  But something about Kansas resisted change, whether it came from up a smoke stack or down the barrel of a gun.

Kansas had Christmas card winters.  Box of chocolate winters.  Knee deep then waist deep in snow winters. It was picture perfect from the window.

Knee deep and then waist deep in it, it was just cold and wet and heavy.

The shovel handle in his hands was worn smooth from the palms of generations of Tracys.  Back, way back, when they lived here full time, Virgil believed uncritically grandpa’s stories of an unchanging tool, passed down from father to son.  But now he himself has changed the blade once, repaired the handle twice, and he knows better now how thing can both change and yet endure.

There’s a tiny wobble that told him he’d have to do yet more repairs before this visit was out.  Virgil kicked the flat of the blade, frowning.  He just replaced that…four winters ago.

“Time flies,” he muttered to himself, measuring up the haft, trying to judge whether the tool would last the distance. “Guess I’m shoveling snow until there’s no more snow, or no more shovel.”  There’s no-one around but him, his tiny snort of laughter causing a plume of steam in the frozen still air.

Virgil stopped for a moment to adjust his beanie, tug up his gloves.  The flat landscape, coated in snow, stretched out in all directions, broken only by old, weather-worn buildings and the ripple of buried fences.  Every landmark told a story, the history of Tracys on this farm.

He’ll shovel this snow, do whatever chores Grandma set, but there was very little here that marked his place on this land.  Kansas is somewhere they come now, no longer somewhere they live.

The story of Tracys on this land stops with them.

Virgil tried not to notice how that made his heart ache.  He believed in their work, loved everything it stood for, but a part of him could still mourn the future sacrificed, here on this farm, working the land like generations before.  Same but different.  Continuous, but broken.

Maybe, through some fluke of luck, some future descendent would come back here, use this shovel to push snow in a different frozen winter. Virgil nodded to himself, quietly pleased at the thought, and set back to his task.

There were still parts and tools in the old, warped shed.  He’d repair the shovel before he left tomorrow.


End file.
